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 But
Heaven forbid that I should say anything derogatory of
advertising, which is a necessity of our day and the very soul
of business, especially in bookselling. I am only affirming
that, though the cover of the book may have become an adornment,
it was at all events at first an affiche. This is proved
by the fact that book-lovers were not at once persuaded that
such covers ought to be preserved. It was only some little time
after the fashion became general among the publishers that it
became a custom to keep the cover under the binding, and that it
thus became a permanent evidence of the taste of our epoch—good
or bad, as the future may decide.
Another proof that it was rather a desire for advertising
than an artistic intention which controlled the illustration of
book-covers is that often the more insignificant and commonplace
the book, the " louder " was the cover. There have
been books which have been seized and persecuted by law on the
evidence of too loud a cover ; but generally, if the cover was
very risky it was safe to conclude that the inside was extremely
prosy, not to say drowsy. It was like a circus booth, where the
posters
promise you the most exciting spectacles, and where the
deluded spectators, once having entered, find nothing to look at for their two
sous but a melancholy
old monkey, or a seal uncomfortably confined in a tank which
very imperfectly recalls the boundless ocean.
Whatever
its cause, the vogue of the illustrated cover was started,
somewhere about ten years ago, by a true artist — one of the
most original and subtle of his time, indeed—Jules Chéret.
And this was the way of it: Chéret was already known for his
superb posters, which were sought by all collectors, and which
were to be seen as wall ornaments in almost every painter's and
sculptor's studio. There was extant at this same time an
energetic, amusing, and odd personage — very well known to the
youngsters among the artists and littérateurs—named
Jules Lévy, whose name makes it unnecessary to say that he had
considerable business faculty. He had a fairly important
position in the celebrated publishing house of Hachette, but he
was ambitious to set up a business on his own account. You can
imagine that the house of Hachette, with its character and its
class of publications, has commonly had rather a serious staff
of employees, like the staff of a ministry or at least the
membership of the Institute. All the same, there have been at
least two exceptions to
the rule, who turned out badly, one M. Émile Zola, and the
other this M. Jules Lévy.
It was Jules Lévy who
virtually invented the artistic-literary sect of the  Incohérents;
and in their exhibitions and balls he stirred up his associates
to work out the most reckless notions their brains devised. In
the exhibitions of the Incohérents were to be seen the
most extraordinary charges d'atelier, and at their balls
the most astounding costumes and performances. This remarkable
Jules Lévy, with his long legs, his long arms, his big ears,
his broad mouth, and his long nose, as soon as he found himself
in possession of a sufficient celebrity, carried out his dream
and established himself as a publisher. It was then that he
noticed the analogy between the colored poster and the possible
cover of the book of the future. He knew Chéret and his work,
and he it was who first appealed to the designer of posters to
cover and ornament the books he published. At first this was a
little too much of a novelty, and Jules Lévy came to grief over
it. His idea, which had been as simple as Christopher Columbus's
egg, made him no money; and when he had to shut up his shop
other publishers did not at once begin to decorate their
publications. They came to it a little later, and timidly at
first, but after awhile with an actual craze, and there was for
a time and still is, as I have said, a large quantity of books
whose sole reason for being was in their cover, and whose cover
itself was a "fake."
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